Community-Building Strategies: How to Build an Online Health & Wellness Community

Please, forgive me for what I’m about to say. 

Marketing is about getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

I know, I know. I, too, have heard this axiom so many times it makes me want to scream. Not because it isn’t true. It is. But, the next question that rattles around in my head and the heads of just about every business owner and online service provider I know is: HOW?    

HOW do we get in front of the right people? HOW does our team of coaches get in front of people who are willing to pay for the transformation we can offer them?

Well, thanks to the internet, social media, and, more recently, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, building a successful online community is now one of the leading strategies for converting prospects into customers, scaling content development, improving customer experience, gathering feedback on products and services, and maintaining a loyal customer base.

Should Health & Wellness Coaches Focus on a Community-Building Marketing Strategy?

Yes, you should already be building a sense of community in online learning and branded training experiences, but you should also be building an actual community. Why? A majority of people who use the internet are engaging in online communities and will continue to do so. Online communities satisfy a deep human need for connection and for being heard. Need a statistic? A GlobalWebIndex 2020 study found that in 2019, 76% of internet users had participated in an online community.  

Plus, the advantages of building a successful online community are clear. A few of the big benefits for businesses are:

• improved user experience 
• enhanced customer loyalty
• reduced support costs
• better development of new products and services; and
• increased website traffic and SEO

While building a successful online community requires a few key components, using community-building strategies doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it can be quite simple if you’re using a health and wellness coaching platform like Profi.io because you can fully integrate your service delivery and community-building activities.

Having a community-building marketing strategy written out and built out with specific objectives, metrics, and tactics is the key to successfully building an online community to support your health or wellness coaching business.

If you’re a corporate or network Profi.io user, community-building features come baked in. Profi has integrated a community platform, PeerBoard, into your branded portal, so you can build your community in sync with your service delivery. You get your client relationship management, client and team scheduling, billing, online course creation, and service-based community-building all in one place. This lets you use an integrated community-building business model out of the box.

Ready to harness the powerful advantages of building an online community of health- and wellness-minded people? In the steps ahead, I’ll walk you through how to build a successful online community that will support the growth of your health or wellness coaching business even in the face of quickly changing health and wellness trends. 

Step 1: Develop Your Community-Building Marketing Strategy

To use community-building as a marketing strategy, you shouldn’t be adding any old forum software you come across to your website or creating a Facebook group on a whim and seeing if anything comes of it. 

Community-building is an active strategy. For any marketing strategy to work, it must be purposefully planned before it can be well implemented. 

You need a community-building blueprint consisting of:

• a clear picture of your audience and ideal client persona (ICP),
• a solid understanding of your brand messaging,
• an outline of your community goals and how they align with your overall business goals,
• the metrics you’ll use to understand what’s working and what isn’t; and
• a decision about the tool or tools you’ll be using to build your community.

Having a community-building marketing strategy written out and built out with specific objectives, metrics, and tactics is the key to successfully building an online community to support your health or wellness coaching business.

Step 2: Make Your Branded Community Accessible Through a Dedicated Platform

There are a lot of options for where to host your online community. You could start a Facebook or LinkedIn group, for example. If your ideal clients can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, or any of the other places people gather online, then on some level it makes sense to reach out with your message where your audience already engages. But, there are limitations to using standalone social media platforms as your community-building tool.

There’s also enormous value in integrating your community management with your service workflow. With PeerBoard integrated into the Profi.io platform, for example, it is very easy for team members to engage directly in community conversations in real-time.

There’s a ton of competition for people’s attention on mainstream social media platforms, and the relative anonymity can unleash the anti-social behavior of bad actors, which you then have to mitigate. But, the biggest limitation is that you don’t own the channel.

🔖 Learn How Innovation Experts is building their consulting community vision with Profi.

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With a dedicated platform for your community, you get to ensure users have the features they want, and you get more direct engagement with your brand.   

There’s also enormous value in integrating your community management with your service workflow. With PeerBoard integrated into the Profi.io platform, for example, it is very easy for team members to engage directly in community conversations in real-time.

Step 3: Provide Incentives for People to Engage in the Community

As you’re creating your community-building marketing strategy (see “Step 1”), you should be answering questions about the incentives that will bring people into your community and help them decide to stay and engage.

• What rewards will you offer? 
• What intrinsic value will people receive from joining the community?
• How can you promote/make clear what the value is? 

When using a dedicated community-building platform, you need to provide strong reasons for people to sign-up for your particular community, which makes it especially important to have a clear value proposition. Adding extra incentives, including loyalty programs, can also be very effective.

Step 4: Moderate and Engage with Your Community

Remember when asking people to sign up for a newsletter was everyone’s go-to tactic for building an audience? Those days are numbered. Sure, some of the “right” people subscribe, and you can slowly build an email list, but it feels like a one-way street, and frankly, it’s a lot of work. 

A community-building marketing strategy, on the other hand, is anything but a one-way street: It’s about connecting and building relationships with people who share things in common and who are eager to give feedback.

🗣️ What was Innovation Experts' secret ingredient to pivoting their business in a pandemic? Did someone say community? Read the customer story.

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You want to know how to build a sense of community online? Have your team engage regularly with other people in your online community. That’s much easier to do when everything your team needs is in one place — one place to create and offer lessons, one place to schedule sessions, and one place to join collaborative discussions with clients and others like them.

But the best benefit is a reciprocal one. Community feedback helps you provide better coaching and training products and services. And nothing is more valuable to your customers than getting exactly what they need to solve their problems and make their transformations.

Step 5: Get Better from Building a Successful Online Community, then Give Back

Your coaching or training business will be rewarded with big benefits from building a successful online community — from improved customer loyalty to reduced support costs. 

But the best benefit is a reciprocal one. You get to use the community feedback you receive to make better coaching and training products and provide better services. And nothing is more valuable to your customers than getting exactly what they need to solve their problems and make their transformations.

Ready to put your community-building strategies into action? Book a Demo with one of our Product Coaches today to see how using Profi.io’s Peerboard community integration in corporate and network plans can maximize the impact of your community-building marketing strategy.